Currently on sabbatical, fall 2022 through spring 2023 Some Great Quotes on Teaching:
"At [a great] school you are not engaged so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism. . . . A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spend on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness. And above all you go to a great school for self-knowledge." --William Cory, Reflections of an Eton Master "Conversation . . . springs from the movement of present minds disposed to intellectual adventure. Its enemies are the tedious, pertinacious talkers, resisting the flow without being able to give it a fresh direction; those who, like a worn gramophone record, distract the company by the endless repetition of what may have begun by being an observation but, on the third time round, becomes the indecent revelation of an empty mind; the noisy, the quarrelsome, the disputatious, the thrusters, the monopolists and the informers who carry books in their pockets and half-remembered quotations in their heads. Conversation cannot easily survive those who talk to win, who won’t be silent until they are refuted, those who won’t forget or who cannot remember, those who are too lazy to catch what comes their way or who (like men of putty) are too unresponsive to do anything but let it stick." --Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Conversation in the Education of Mankind” "[An introductory course such as this] will do best to confine itself to major texts which are in the hands of the students. Their interpretation will amount to philosophical training. The spirit of meditation, the capacity for penetrating self-analysis, the way of unbiased thinking, an openness for all substantial possibilities—all of this cannot be directly taught, but it can be awakened and trained in the comprehension of great philosophizing. How it will come about is incalculable." --Karl Jaspers, “On Studying Philosophy” "Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books." —C.S. Lewis |
Undergraduate Classes
Ancient Great Texts Ancient & Medieval Political Thought Modern Political Thought Religious Liberty: Historical, Legal, and Geopolitical Political Philosophy Against Ideology Just War Tradition Liberalism Socialism Progressivism & the New Deal Conservatism Graduate Seminars Ancient Greek Political Philosophy Modern Political Thought Methods of Political Philosophy Liberalism Contemporary Political Philosophy |